Yariv, Amnon
Oral history interview with Amnon Yariv, 1999 November 17, 24 and December 1.
Interview in three sessions in November and December 1999 with Amnon Yariv. Yariv recalls his life and career, beginning with his childhood in Tel Aviv in the British Mandate of Palestine, his parents Polish background, and his early education, which included military training. In 1948, British occupation ended and he participated in the Israeli-Arab conflict; then in 1950, left the Israeli Army to attend the Technion, a technical university in Haifa. Yariv emigrated to the United States in 1951, and matriculated at San Mateo Junior College before transferring to Berkeley. There he studied electrical engineering (control theory), switched to radio engineering under John Whinnery for his M.S., then entered new field of masers for his Ph.D. In 1959, Yariv joined a group at Bell Labs under James P. Gordon working on making the first laser, and visited T. H. Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories after Maiman produced the first laser. Yariv left Bell Labs to work on lasers for Watkins-Johnson, then joined Caltech in 1964 as associate professor of electrical engineering where he set up a laboratory on semiconductor lasers and another on nonlinear optics. Yariv also discusses his contacts with Roy Gould, the laser work of Nicholas George, his teaching courses in solid-state physics and laser physics, and his starting the applied physics program in 1970 with professors Thomas C. McGill, Roy Gould, Marc-Aurele Nicolet, William B. Bridges, Ahmed Zewail, William A. Goddard, Kerry Vahala, Harry Atwater, Paul Bellan, Noel Corngold, and Axel Scherer. In 1967 his paper proposes optoelectronic integrated circuits using gallium arsenide crystals, and in the late 1970s Yariv was invited by Tel Aviv University to join the Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies. Yariv discusses ideas of Charles Kao on enabling fiberoptics with laser light, the pioneer work at Corning on fiberoptics, the work of his graduate student Kam Lau on modulation speeds, and the history of optical communication field. The interview also includes a discussion of the science of nonlinear optics and phase conjugate optics, his work as a consultant for Arroyo Optics, his collaboration with Scherer on micro-optics, an Air Force grant to study artificial periodic optical materials (photonic band-gap materials), as well as a discussion of companies started by his former students. Concludes by commenting on his service in the 1980s on a committee formed to restructure LIGO, and on his frequent visits to Japan and his collaboration with Hitachi Labs.
Amnon Yariv; B.S. (1954), M.S. (1956), Ph.D. (1958), University of California Berkeley; professor California Institute of Technology (Caltech) (1964- ). Research interests: masers, worked on first laser, fiberoptics, nonlinear optics and phase conjugate optics.
Bridges, William B., 1934-
Corngold, Noel Robert David, 1929-
Gordon, James P.
Gould, Roy W. (Roy Walter), 1927-
Maiman, Theodore H.
Whinnery, John R.
Yariv, Amnon
Zewail, Ahmed H.
California Institute of Technology -- Faculty.
Engineering.
Fiber optics.
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.
Masers.
Nonlinear optics -- Research.
Semiconductor lasers.
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Oral histories. aat
Transcripts. aat
Cohen, Shirley, 1922-, interviewer.
AIP-ICOS
California Institute of Technology. Institute Archives. 1201 East California Blvd. (Mail Code 015A-74), Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.